11-Feb-2019: Rajasthan Assembly passes Bills to scrap minimum education criterion
The Rajasthan Assembly passed by voice vote the two bills, Rajasthan Panchayati Raj (Amendment) Bill, 2019 and the Rajasthan Municipality (Amendment) Bill, 2019, which seek to end the minimum education criterion for panchayat and civic polls candidates.
The previous Vasundhara Raje-led government had introduced education criterion in 2015 which required a candidate to pass class 10 for contesting zila parishad, panchayat samiti and municipal elections.
For contesting elections for Sarpanch of a panchayat in scheduled and other than scheduled areas, it was mandatory to pass class 5 and 8, respectively.
30-Dec-2018: Rajasthan Assembly Passes Bill to Scrap Minimum Education Qualification for Civic Polls.
In its first Cabinet meeting since taking over, the Congress government in Rajasthan has decided to remove the condition of minimum qualification required to contest civic elections.
The previous BJP government in the state had made it mandatory for people contesting zila parishad, panchayat samiti and municipal elections to have passed Class 10, those contesting sarpanch elections to have passed Class 8 and those standing for sarpanch elections in panchayats in scheduled areas to have cleared Class 5.
State government has decided to remove the condition of mandatory qualification for contesting in local body or Panchayati Raj elections. The requirement of minimum qualification for contesting elections is against the very spirit of 73rd and 74th amendments. It also violates the right of every citizen to vote and to contest elections, which form the basic structure of the constitution.
In a democracy, whether a person is literate or illiterate, when we can’t stop him from contesting Assembly elections, we have no right to stop him from contesting local body or Panchayati Raj polls.
Even Haryana had passed a similar law mandating minimum education qualification for those contesting in Panchayat Raj Institutions. The constitutional validity of this law of Haryana was questioned in the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court had upheld the constitutional validity of the law enacted by Haryana government to bar the illiterate from contesting panchayat polls in the state. The Supreme Court had ruled that “it is only education which gives a human being the power to discriminate between right and wrong, good and bad”.
The Supreme Court’s interpretation is based on the fact that uneducated or illiterate people getting elected to the local bodies can easily be misled by officials if they don’t know to write and read. In
such cases, administrative actions that they are doing can pose many challenges. The Court has further observed that it is only the education which can give people the power to differentiate between right and wrong, and good and bad.